How did Gail’s bakery become so controversial?

What is it about Gail’s that raises the hackles of Londoners? It depends on who you ask. Some deride the bakery chain as Greggs for posh people; a yummy mummy Mecca where the jam is organic and the oat lattes are reassuringly expensive. For others, Gail’s is a bellwether of gentrification and a venture capital backed Goliath which independent cafés fear. More recently, it has been boycotted by pro-Palestine protesters over its supposed links to Israel.

For one of its co-founders, Tom Molnar, the furore is confusing. “We’re just a bakery, you know?” he shrugged in an interview last year. So how did just a bakery become a political football, whose £5 sourdough divides the chattering classes?

When a new branch of Gail’s opened in Archway, north London in February, it presented a confusing sight for passers-by. There was the cherry red awning, the pristine window display stacked with sourdough loaves, and a pastel-coloured sign outside advertising elderflower iced matcha. It was all perfectly curated quaintness.

Yet one morning, staff arrived to find that someone had taken a hammer to all of the windows in the night. Red graffiti was daubed across the walls, instructing Archway’s inhabitants to “Reject corporate Zionism”, boycott Gail’s and “support local businesses”. The week before, “Free Gaza” had been spray painted on one of the walls. Staff said they were scared to come into work, wondering what it could be next. “We want to serve the best possible food to our communities, and the vandalism we experienced in Archway serves as a distraction from doing just that,” said Molnar in a statement to the Standard.

This week, in a now-amended Guardian column, journalist Jonathan Liew wrote that the “very presence” of Gail’s in Archway, a stone’s throw from an independent Palestinian café, felt like “an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression”. The claim sparked accusations of antisemitism from across the political spectrum, and led a pro-Israel campaign group to organise a protest outside the Guardian’s offices. Attendees toted Gail’s paper bags in a show of solidarity.

The bakery is named after Gail Mejia, an Israeli businesswoman who moved to London in 1978. Mejia set up a wholesale bakery called The Bread Factory in the 1990s, which supplied bread to some of London’s top restaurants. In 2003, Mckinsey investors Molnar (from Florida) and Ran Avidan (from Tel Aviv) bought half of the business, and two years later the trio opened the first Gail’s branded bakery on Hampstead High Street. From the beginning, the brand identity was strong. Employees were, and still are, called “breadheads”, and the interiors were designed to look artisanal and eclectic, with oak countertops and exposed brick walls. “Even the guacamole is handmade here,” Avidan said proudly in a 2007 interview. The plan was clear: Avidan said they wanted to open “as many shops as we can, as fast as we can, as long as we can stick to what we believe in”.

On some corners of the internet, the fact that two of the founders of Gail’s are Israeli is enough grounds for a boycott. In one Instagram video with over 1,700 likes, a man walks into a Gail’s and announces to the queueing customers: “Hey, just to make you aware, this is an Israeli-owned coffee shop.”

Gail’s has said in statements that it is “a British business with no specific connections to any country or government outside the UK”. Mejia and Avidan are no longer involved in the business, but subsequent investors have brought fresh controversies. Mejia was bought out in 2011 by Luke Johnson, the former chairman of Patisserie Valerie, which collapsed in 2019 after alleged accounting fraud. Johnson often posts on X about things which he thinks are nonsense: the Covid lockdown, net zero, and the “disease” of woke that has infected everything from universities and corporations to the Financial Times. He also hates Sadiq Khan. “London has had a Muslim socialist mayor since 2016. It’s like a city committing slow suicide,” he posted last year. In late 2023, the barrister Jolyon Maugham called for a boycott of Gail’s over Johnson’s views. He even offered to send one of his X followers some sourdough starter to help wean them off the bread.

Since 2021, the chain has been majority owned by Bain Capital, an American private investment firm which bought Avidan’s stake and a proportion of Johnson’s. In the intervening years, it has rapidly expanded. When Bain invested, there were 73 Gail’s across England and the company was estimated to be worth £200 million. Now there are around 200, with plans for 40 more this year. When Gail’s enlisted Goldman Sachs to drive further investment in 2024, the company’s estimated value had ballooned to £500m.

Before the Archway branch had its windows smashed, there was a protest outside organised by Islington Palestine Solidarity Campaign. The organisers have said that their protest had “nothing to do with the fact that Gail’s founders are Israeli”, nor were they responsible for the vandalism. Rather, they objected to Bain Capital’s “predatory growth model” which harms local businesses, and the fact that it invests in Israeli tech and cybersecurity companies.

Second to the politics are the price tags. Gail’s is comfortably at the upper end of London’s flat white index with its £4.10 offering — though it is no more expensive than comparable upmarket chains like Rosslyn and Redemption Roasters. Gail’s says that it is committed to quality, even if it comes at a higher price. The milk they use comes from a family-run farm in Lancaster, while their beans are sourced by London-based Union Coffee.

Molnar has said that the rapid expansion of Gail’s is happening because “we need more points of sale for good bread”. And in the world of good bread, £4.80 for a sourdough loaf is actually quite reasonable. A similar loaf from popular east London bakery The Dusty Knuckle will set you back £5.80, while M&S’s “craft collection” signature sourdough costs up to £5.75.

Its stores may have sprouted up across the breadth of England, from Essex to Ellesmere Port, but Gail’s still identifies as a “neighbourhood bakery” and paints a cutesy image of itself. “Whilst we are ordinary people, we want to make extraordinary things,” intones the About Us page on the website. All the loaves are “lovingly crafted”, and Gail’s stated raison d’être is to “bring humanity back into the food world, and back to local communities”. Most locations are partnered with local charities who they donate leftover food to, though staff say that lots of sandwiches have to be thrown out each day, as they are not kept refrigerated. This makes them taste better but means they can only be on display for a few hours.

Molnar is insistent that Gail’s branches are called bakeries (he repeatedly corrected a podcast host, who kept calling them “stores”), though it is something of a technicality. While the muffins and sandwiches are prepared in-store, the bread and most of the pastries and cakes are baked in a factory on an industrial estate in Hendon — or in Gail’s lingo, “our central craft bakery”.

“I definitely don’t see them as a neighbourhood bakery,” says Sanne Wigbels. In November last year, a Gail’s opened directly opposite Wigbels’ plant shop and café, Ivy and the Wolf, in Crystal Palace. “A chain that opens up large scale cafés in areas which are already saturated with cafés and bakeries is not a neighbourly thing,” she says. Wigbels’ main concern is that the arrival of Gail’s has “opened the door for bigger businesses that have deeper pockets and can afford longer term rents”, which would in turn drive up rent for others. Molnar told the Standard: “we believe a healthy high street is a diverse one made up of many different businesses”.

Gail’s used to be concentrated in leafy west London neighbourhoods, where it earned its reputation as a bakery for posh people. When top brass are scouting out new locations, farmer’s markets and schools are green flags they look for. But really, anywhere will do nowadays — even Gatwick airport. Beyond the prices, there is a sense that Gail’s is designed to cater for a certain stratum of the English bourgeoisie. According to Milla, a former barista at Gail’s East Sheen, her branch was a hotbed for “yoga mummies”, who would come in to “drop their children on the floor together and have a coffee”. Perhaps that image is why the residents of Walthamstow (once named the “coolest” neighbourhood in the UK) objected so strongly to the arrival of a Gail’s in 2024. A petition against the bakery opening received over 1,800 signatures from locals, who felt it would take away from the character of their high street. Earlier that summer, the Liberal Democrats had used the chain as part of its election strategy. When looking for seats they might win from the Tories, one of the questions they asked was “Does it have a Gail’s?”

Since Bain took over, various processes have been implemented to make the bakeries as streamlined and profitable as possible. Staff must aim to fulfil each hot drink order within two minutes, and every week, managers are sent a “coffee efficiency report” for the store. “It made zero sense,” recalls Jake (not his real name), who worked as a barista at Gail’s in 2025. There was a screen above the coffee machine with orders which hadn’t yet been fulfilled, and a timer for each one — whether it was a single espresso or six drinks with different milks.

“During a rush, it would pressurise you to be sloppy and potentially mix up drinks, and it took out the more conversational, community-building part that Gail’s is supposedly meant to be preaching,” Jake says. A poor coffee efficiency score led to “unnecessary hounding” from the manager, and added time pressure the following week. Molnar told The Standard that Gail’s is focused on great service, and “like most in the hospitality industry we use delivery targets to support this.” For other baristas, the coffee timer did sometimes come in handy with impatient customers. “I’d get a lot of people that would be in my face and rude, or trying to grab someone else’s coffee,” recalls Milla. “I’d say, ‘You’ve been waiting for 1 minute 54 seconds, chill out.’”

Managers receive quarterly bonuses based on five key targets — one of them being the profitability of their branch. At busy London outlets, the turnover is high enough not to split hairs. But the Gail’s Jake worked at was in a sleepy commuter town and was under “constant financial strain”. Jake says that if it was quiet at the start of the week, his hours for later that week were often cut down. Or, on days with low footfall, “it would be strongly suggested that I could finish my shift early and lose out on two or three hours of work.” Gail’s assert that they “plan and publish rotas at least two weeks in advance so our employees can organise their time outside of work”.

Gail’s now has over 2,000 “breadheads” and turned over nearly £220m last year (up over 20 per cent from the year before), with an operating profit of £25m. Critics argue that the company uses investor money to overwhelm competition. Critics of the critics say that this is just an aversion to success and growth — and at what point does a bakery’s multiplication become unacceptable? Cult favourite Pophams has three branches across east London, but what about Buns From Home, which has opened over 20 locations across the city in the past few years?

The woman who gave her name to Gail’s now lives a quiet life in Portugal with her husband. In a rare interview with Airmail a couple of years ago, Mejia said she found the idea that Gail’s was a gentrifying force “uniquely distasteful”. She accepts that “not everything is perfect” (she said that the coffee was “shit”) but ultimately, love it or hate it, Gail’s has a captive audience. “It’s insanely successful,” she said. “You can’t argue with that.”